All Browser Bookmarks, from the makers of 1Password, is a free program that gives you easy access to your Internet bookmarks from multiple browsers via the Mac OS X menubar. Instead of launching Safari or Firefox and then opening the respective favorites menu and selecting a favorite, you can click the menu bar icon for All Browser Bookmarks and choose a bookmark.

The program lets you view your favorites separated by browser or combined, and you can choose which browser's favorites you want All Browser Bookmarks to show. 1Password users will find a section for their saved web forms making it easy to get to sites requiring authentication.

Homepage Startup tries to set itself apart from a stampede of web 2.0 start pages by focusing on the fact that the majority of web users regularly visit no more than a handful of websites. The concept is pretty straightforward (if not exactly original): set this site as your homepage and when your browser window opens you have instant access to your favorite search engine and a grid of links to your favorite websites. Each link is identified by a screen shot and you can easily rearrange them by dragging and dropping to your hearts content. You can even get this all setup before creating an account.

When put up against the likes of iGoogle and My Yahoo there isn't a lot to do here, but that isn't a bad thing. Often the key to success is doing one thing well and not overpowering your users with unneeded features. Links are what Homepage Startup does well and they deliberately do not burden users with RSS feeds, weather, widgets, news, or anything else that is likely handled better by a dedicated service.

If you are looking for something simple to pop up when you click your browser's Home button then Homepage Startup is well worth checking out.

[via freewaregenius]

Flock, the Mozilla based web browser still under development in private beta, is getting a nice overhaul with its 0.9 release tomorrow. If you're not familiar with Flock, it was released in 2005 with much anticipation and hype as the social network browser. Flock was created to integrate various social networks into one browser platform so you could conceivably post items to your blog, update your Facebook page, upload to Flickr and all the while stream YouTube videos.

It didn't live up to its hype for various reasons and some would argue, Firefox accomplishes all these social network tasks with their never ending inventory of useful add-ons.

However, the blogosphere's consensus is Flock 0.9 is a bird of a different feather (no more bird references, we swear) and is quite positive about Flock's new makeover. Here are some nifty features:

My World: Flock tells you when your friends have new photos and videos and when you have new feeds. My World gives quick access to your recently visited favorite sites as well.

Account Detection: Informs you when there are available feeds and media streams on a page and when your account log-in can be configured with Flock.

Video Support: Find YouTube and Truveo videos with the Media Minibar.

Online Favorites: Easily post your favorites to del.icio.us and ma.gnolia.

Drag'n'Drop: Drag and drop photos and images from the Web Clipboard to webmail, comments, blogs, etc.

BlogEditor: Added Blogger and LiveJournal support. Also, now you can preview what your blog post will look like before pushing 'Publish.' Tags are now enabled and have included Technorati, Livejournal and Blogger-specific tags.

Photo Uploader: Edit options for a specific photo or the whole batch; easily set photo to commonly selected sizes

Flock has these media apps covered:

Blogging: Blogger, LiveJournal, Xanga, Wordpress.com, Typepad
Media: Flickr, Photobucket, YouTube
Bookmarks: del.icio.us, ma.gnolia

We realize you can't have everything, but where's Twitter? New guy on the block, Pownce? Maybe we can expect to see Flock support these additions in the 1.0 release sometime this fall.

Flock runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Thanks FF!